diskreta

Discretion is not scattered chalk. Diskreta looks beautifully cuttable and is not. Esperanto really does have a dis- prefix meaning apart or in all directions (disdoni, to hand out; disiri, to go separate ways), and kreta really is the adjective from kreto, chalk. Put them together and you get a confident, wrong reading. There is no seam: diskret- is one Latin root, and the resemblance is an accident of spelling. The word-building article's rule applies - check that the piece behind the prefix is a word that makes sense there before you trust the cut.

What the Latin actually says. Discernere is to separate one thing from another, dis- plus cernere, to sift. Its participle discretus means kept apart. So the underlying idea is discrimination in the old neutral sense: a discreet person sorts what may be repeated from what may not. English kept two descendants of the same word and spelled them differently to stop the confusion, giving discreet (tactful) and discrete (separate). Esperanto has only the one form and lets it do both jobs.

Which means diskreta does double duty. The everyday sense is tactful, unobtrusive, good at not mentioning things: diskreta demando, diskreta helpo. The mathematical sense, separate and countable as opposed to continuous, is also diskreta in technical Esperanto: diskreta matematiko. Context does all the work, and the two senses almost never appear in the same kind of text.

The company it keeps. Prudenta is sensible and cautious, ĝentila polite in manner, silenta simply quiet. Diskreta is the one about judgement: knowing what to leave out. The adverb is diskrete, the noun diskreteco, and the opposite is maldiskreta, which is a wonderfully economical way to call someone a gossip. One rank-neighbourhood note: konkreta carries the identical false chalk seam from the other direction - Latin sifted here, grew together there, and kreto the actual chalk stands apart from both.